ABSTRACT
To the contemporaries, one of these institutions—government or big business, the university or the union—often looks like the institution. To the future historian, the most impressive fact may be the emergence of a new and distinct pluralism. Government looks like the most powerful of these institutions—it is certainly the one that spends the most. Government, to be effective and strong, may have to learn to "decentralize" to the other institutions, to do less in order to achieve more. What has emerged in the 1969 half-century is a new pluralism. The problems of this new pluralism are quite different from the problems of both the pluralisms of our past and the unitary society of our political theory and constitutional law. In the new pluralism each institution has different tasks. The pluralist structure of modern society is independent, by and large, of political constitution and control, of social theory, or of economics. It requires a political and social theory of its own.
